Future Role of Copper

High performance broadband over copper from Actelis is already making copper the strategic asset needed to enhance the value of fiber and DSL assets and enable more profitable delivery of reliable, high performance Ethernet services and bandwidth.

Copper technologies will continue to be an important part of the access toolkit necessary to provide a solid business case for high growth network applications requiring that more bandwidth be taken to more places more cost effectively than ever before.

Copper will continue to be needed to reach more residential subscribers, small and medium businesses, WiFi hotspots, 3G/4G small cells, mini DSLAMs, intelligent traffic system, environmental, utility and industrial sensors, and HD surveillance cameras, more quickly, cost effectively, and profitably than can be done with fiber optics or microwave. This trend will continue well into the future, but over time it will use an increasing variety of technologies. VDSL2 is complementing G.SDHSL, and likewise G.fast will complement VDSL2 and vectoring to provide an increasingly diverse suite of copper access technologies that complement the overall access toolkit and cost optimize broadband builds.

G.SHDSL, will continue to have a role delivering 5, 10, 15 and Nx10 Mbps Ethernet services throughout the metro where longer distances without regeneration are needed, and where symmetrical services are required. G.SHDSL will be used for these situations where relatively more pairs are available. Broadband over copper solutions supporting both G.SHDSL and VDSL will be important for non facility-based providers such as CLECs that do not own their own copper and cannot implement amplification.

VDSL2, which offers more bandwidth over a few km with bonded copper, will continue to be used for both business and residential applications in the future. For businesses, bonded EFM over Copper will transport asymmetric high speed services more efficiently over fewer pairs out to several kft, greater distances using Actelis’ Broadband Amplifiers. This will meet the need for many and small and medium business Ethernet applications and for many small cell and WiFi backhaul needs. In residential applications, VDSL2 Broadband Amplifiers will operate with vectoring to increase the distance and bandwidth of existing DSLAMs, enabling larger customer serving areas. This will reduce the need to push quite as many very small DSLAMs as close to customers and expand the customer serving area, resulting in savings in site acquisition, greater DSLAM fill rates, and reducing the number and cost of backhaul links required. VDSL2 combined with vectoring and broadband amplification will therefore continue to offer strategic value to broadband providers offering services using mixed copper and FTTx architectures well into the future.

G.fast, a newer technology on the horizon that will support 1+ Gbps over a 100 meters, will enable high speed access in the riser within buildings, and will complement VDSL2 for use in certain broadband access applications where cost effective. For instance, G.fast will be used in applications such as MDU broadband access, where customer density is very high and the location is not so far from the fiber ring as to make backhaul unduly expensive.

Over time, as standards mature and newer ones become available, G.SHDSL, ADSLx, VDSL2, VDSL2 in combination with vectoring, and G.fast technologies will provide an increasingly broad toolkit of copper technologies that help cost optimize a wide array of applications. As standards continue to evolve, the mix of copper technologies used may change, but the need for copper economics to fuel growth in a price sensitive market that is increasingly required to take make bandwidth to more places will not.

Broadband networks of the future will continue to rely on a diverse access toolkit, one that includes copper as the strategic asset that cost optimizes the time to market, CapEx, and TCO of the overall network build. The copper transport options within that diverse access toolkit will rely on increasingly expanding and optimized choices in copper transmission technologies. Actelis Networks, a pioneer in broadband over copper, the industry leader in Ethernet First Mile (EFM) bonded copper, and the innovator creating more profitable residential broadband builds with its VDSL2 and ADSLx Broadband Amplifiers, is committed to continue investing in copper to stay on the forefront of making a more profitable future for broadband services a reality.